Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the
ideas, people and movement who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m
Mary Hedengren, Samantha’s in the booth, Humanities Media Project
is the sponsor and Jeff Walker is the subject. Jeffrey Walker is
kind of my hero in life. I get weird around him, the way some
people get around Natalie Portman or David Beckham. I came to the
University of Texas, in part, because I so admired his work, but
when I got here and saw him at parties I found that I mostly
awkwardly stood four feet behind him, which—incidentally, is the
exactly position the camera takes behind the protagonist in horror
movies and I suspect that that didn’t help me much in meeting him.
Since then I’ve taken a class from Dr. Walker, had him speak at
official RSA student chapter meetings, even had a one-on-one
seminar with him, where every week I would exit his office to a
world where the sun shone brighter and the birds sang sweeter.
That’s how much I like Jeffrey Walker. He’s a great human being,
but he’s also a darn fine scholar.

Dr. Walker’s first book in 1989, Bardic Ethos and the
American Epic Poem may sound on first blush like a piece of
literary criticism, but it’s actually about persuasion, the very
particular kind of persuasion that demands that the listener put in
as much or more work than the rhetor. In this book, Walker looked
at a very specific genre—the American Epic—and a specific period
and school, and inquired about what kind and amount of rhetorical
work being done. The main difficulty here seems to be audience. To
write an American epic that can both express and inspire the nation
en masse, the poet has got to speak to those masses. But
to be a high literary, post-Romantic bard, the poet has to deal in
the kind of textual, allusion, and thematic obscurity that is
incomprehensible to the masses. In hisconcluding paragraphs, he
sums up the struggle nicely: “The bard, in short, is obliged to
reject the available means for effectively communicating his
historical, political, and ethical vision to the public mind
insofar as he wants to succeed with his tribal audience”
(240, emphasis in original).

Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem traces the
American literary attempts at prophecy without populism from its
origins in Whitman’s “moral magnetism” (30). First identifying both
high poetic speech (93) and “conventions and expectations” for the
audience (118), as the reasons for Pound’s failure to be a “Whitman
who has learned to wear a collar” (2), the book then examines
Crane’s inability to “use his mythic ideal to redeem or bless the
present” (136), in part because “’the popular’ in a modernist
context is generally beneath respectability” (145). While William
Carlos Williams what Walker on another occasion called the “good
guy of the book” (15/2/2011) in trying to write Paterson
for “a public at least partly comprise of actual people” (157), he,
too, fails to write a work that is accepted in both popular and
literary circles. Olson’s Maximus Poems seek a similar
project, but in describing the few that can transform many
sometimes becomes almost eugenically elitist, even to the point of
justified genocide (234). In the end, it seems as though these
modernist bardic writers must chose between a literary and a
popular audience (240), usually coming down on the side of the
literati, ultimately described as the “tribe with whom [the author]
is marooned” (243).

I’m very interested in this
book’s premise of irreconcilable audiences. You might see how this
concept could coordinate with Wayne Booth’s image of the author
sitting around waiting for an audience. While Booth dismisses this
idea, this book kind of suggests that it happens, regardless of the
author’s intention; these writers sought a broad and a specific
audience, but only the specific audience came to the table. I
always think about the hero of Nightmare Abbey, who wrote
a metaphysical tome so boring that it only sold seven copies. The
hero then perks up, calling his readers, in his mind, the seven
golden candle sticks. If you write obscure stuff, you probably
aren’t going to reach a wide audience.

The other hugely influential book Walker wrote about the
rhetoric of poetics is his 2000 Rhetoric and Poetics in
Antiquity. The book goes way beyond Whitman and his prophetic
bards to ancient Greek lyric poetry. Poetry back then was always
publicially performed and that, Walker argues, means that it was
always public persuasion. One of the key ways this happened what
through the lyric enthymeme. The Enthymeme, to refresh, is when the
audience supplies part of the argument. So [shave and a haircut].
Or, to make it poetic, when Ol Yeller is, spoiler alert, put down,
the 20th century American audience things “Oh, dogs are like
friends and it’s sad when they die” instead of, like 14th century
Aztecs, thinking, “what’s the big deal? We kill dogs every day—and
eat them.” The audience supplies part of the argument of any
aesthetic piece.

It seems like the main argument Walker’s making in this book is
that the epideictic isn’t derivative and secondary to the other
genres of rhetoric, but actually primary and of almost
“pre-rhetorical” origin. In supplying many examples of ancient
poets who were able to produce the best lyric enthymemes, Walker
not only builds up evidence to support his over all claim, but he
creates sub-categories and conditions for this kind of lyric
enthymeme.. One of the most interesting of these divisions is the
“Argumentation Indoors/Argumentation Outdoors” distinction Walker
illustrates with Alcaeus and Sappho’s lyric poetry. So some of the
public performance weren’t big publics. If Alcaeus spoke only to
his hetaireia (remember them? The geisha like prostitutes like
Aspasia?) or that Sappho make have written for an intimate circle
of acquaintances and devotees doesn’t have to imply that their
poetry could appeal only to those small groups. In fact,
Walker claims that “just the opposite is true” and the poems “offer
enthymematic argumentation that engages with the discourses of a
wider audience” to cement their continued influence (249).

The ideal situations for this kind of poetic influence
disintegrate, though. The book is, after all, called Rhetoric
and Poetics in Antiquity and it’s understandable that the
tracing of suasive lyric has to end somewhere, so Walker seem to
mark the beginning of the end, in both Greece and Rome, with the
literaturaization of poetry and the Aristoltization of rhetoric.
The former leads to a paradigm that literature is removed from
everyday life, erudite, a “decorative display” (57) that “cannot
escape the rhetorical limitations of symposiastic insider
discourse” (289); the latter downplays the rhetorical nature of
poetry (281) while emphasizing rhetoric’s relation to the civic
responsibilities of the forum and the court.

So you can see why I have so much hero-worship for Jeffrey
Walker. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced this is going to be our
last podcast on his work. Yeah. If you have a reason why you love
Jeff Walker, or –I guess—if you want to suggest a podcast about
your own rhetorical heroes, send me an email at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com.
I’ll just be sitting here, dreading the possibility that Dr. Walker
might hear this podcast, getting embarrassed and awkward for a
while.

About the Podcast

A podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have defined the history of rhetoric.